North & Barry

The Ex-marine And The Ex-mayor Appear Very Different But Both Appeal To The Politics Of Rage

October 16, 1994|By MICHAEL KAZIN

Oliver North and Marion Barry have more in common than they know. Yes, the Virginia Republican loathes big government, while the District of Columbia Democrat expanded the city's payroll during his previous tenure as mayor.

But both candidates cut their political teeth in the 1960s - one as a combat officer in Vietnam, the other as a civil-rights organizer in the Deep South - and they share a flamboyant, confrontational style typical of both the New Left (black and white) and the New Right in that decade. And both employ that style in the service of a strategy that might be called balkanized populism.

The 1960s slogan ``all power to the people'' has been altered by the Barry and North campaigns to mean power to my people. It is an effective appeal based on deep resentment of outsiders who share neither their grievances nor their values.

On the one hand, North and Barry sound the traditional themes of American populism when they defend ``ordinary people'' against an entrenched ``establishment.'' The force and conviction with which they speak has inspired twin grass-roots movements in and around the nation's capital.

``I voted for Barry to give the powers that be the finger,'' explained one District of Columbia voter after the Sept. 13 primary.

``He had the whole federal government and the Congress taking him on,'' recalls a North backer of his candidate's electric appearance in 1987 before the Iran-Contra investigating committee, ``and he stood up and fought and he beat 'em.''

On the other hand, unlike previous scourges of the American elite, Barry and North's populist appeal is confined to embattled minorities. Neither candidate seeks to appeal to an unsegmented public; in fact, each candidate draws nearly all his strength from a specific, rather narrow social group - and sparks hostility from almost everybody else.

This is a new kind of American populism. Before the 1960s, the most prominent exponents of populist rhetoric were more inclusive in their definitions of ordinary people and more optimistic about winning a broad majority of Americans to their side.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the Democrat William Jennings Bryan and the Socialist Eugene V. Debs called for uniting the ``producing classes'' against a tiny band of ``monopolists.'' In the 1930s, Franklin D. Roosevelt hailed ``the forgotten man'' and railed at ``economic royalists.'' In the 1980s, Oliver North's old hero Ronald Reagan was brilliant at wooing white Democrats, ``the working families of America,'' in the kind of sunny, altruistic terms that had captivated him during the New Deal. Reagan deftly put the ominous if vague ``special interests'' in the place once reserved for the corporate rich. Like Bryan, Debs and FDR, he vowed to close the gap between the American principle of equal opportunity and a degraded reality.

In contrast, North and Barry have tended to speak from behind the seemingly permanent barricades of race and culture.

North's people of virtue are men and women enraged by what he calls ``radical homosexuals'' and ``pro-abortion fanatics'' and by the ``Roman emperors'' who run Congress. Styling his supporters as gun-toting, hard-working and God-fearing (their whiteness all but assumed), he promises to behave like a conservative guerrilla fighter if elected to the very body to which he once, admittedly, lied under oath.

In fact, his skirmish with Congress remains a badge of honor, evidence to his admirers that at least one battle-hardened patriot was willing to stand up to a pack of pusillanimous, over-paid civilians.

Barry's ordinary folks are African-Americans from the inner city beset by racist contempt and economic neglect. He regards his own victory as a metaphor for his people's need to lift their burdens of violence and poverty. And he doesn't protest when supporters maintain that his arrest for possession of crack cocaine was the culmination of a cynical plot to drive a proud, independent black man from office.

Barry won an impressive victory in the Democratic primary, pulling in more middle-class black voters than most pundits expected. But it is doubtful he can win over many of the voters who opposed him.

Interestingly, the North and Barry campaigns share the same constellation of enemies - though one calls it the liberal elite and the other the white power structure. The Washington Post, as the paper of the Washington social and cultural establishment, catches hell from both insurgent camps (North calls it the Washington Compost), much as it has since the 1960s when both New Leftists and admirers of Richard Nixon viewed it as their enemy.

The current congressional leadership is a common villain - whether for wasting taxpayers' money or blocking D.C. statehood. The balkanized populists also benefit in equal measure from their identification with the spiritual revival of the last quarter-century.